What Is Data Reporting And How To Create Data Reports For Your Business

Collecting and analyzing data helps professionals track and monitor a company’s progress and success. As you know, half of your marketing budget will be spent in vain, but it’s essential to determine which half and adjust your strategy on time.

Just as your car’s speedometer shows you how fast you’re driving (and perhaps whether you’ll be late for your meeting), a well-configured report helps you determine the success of your brand’s promotions and the effectiveness of your marketing channels to evaluate whether you’ll have time to fulfill your sales plan. In this article, we consider what data reporting is, how to write a data report, and what data templates you can use as a guide.

Data reporting helps you track what’s happening to your business and evaluate its performance. It’s the process of collecting, merging, and visualizing raw data from all available sources. Most often, it's presented in the form of tables, graphs, or charts.

Also, you shouldn’t forget that:

• In most cases, data-based records show only historical data, so you see an assessment of past actions that you’re no longer able to change.
• To adequately evaluate your brand’s ongoing performance, you need to understand the context (at least consider the industry and niche in which your company works).

With modern martech tools, you can evaluate past events, monitor what’s happening in real time, and use machine learning to predict your customers’ future actions.

You need to gather all possible information to get specific and validated answers to business questions. Using data analysis, you can get powerful insights, detect errors or problems, and fix them before significant damage is done.

In the past, marketing reports included slides from presentations, screenshots of PDF files, and huge, incomprehensible tables. Naturally, they couldn’t provide any real-time data or predictive insights. However, with the advent of modern tools, it’s possible to say goodbye to this suffering.

With modern marketing services, you don’t need to be a professional to build the reports you require and get answers to your questions. Nowadays, martech tools provide real-time data and offer easy-to-understand visualizations. With business intelligence solutions, you can collect all the information you need, perform advanced analytics, and bring businesses more value.

Modern services allow even inexperienced specialists to make data work and transform tables with numbers into understandable dashboards with options such as real-time updates, critical notifications, and the ability to share insights with colleagues. Also, modern cloud-based solutions are easily customizable to meet any business requirements and are optimized for mobile devices, which means you’ll have 24/7 access to business-boosting information. So you can control what happens at any time of the day or night, from anywhere in the world.

In the online world, information is everything and everywhere. According to Gartner, 74% of CMOs expect to increase spending on digital advertising and 66% expect to increase spending on paid search in 2021. This means companies will spend million-dollar budgets without properly organized and customized processes for tracking their performance.

By analyzing data, you can make informed decisions and test working hypotheses. You can specify where your company’s resources go, what progress has been made, and what your company should pay attention to most.

Want to know how to write a data analysis report? Let’s look at the steps you need to take to create what perfectly fits your company:

Step 1. Determine the report’s purpose and which specific questions it should answer. Different specialists need different reports, and, of course, they need answers to different questions. And too many questions in one dashboard can overload it.

Step 2. Define metrics and data sources. Once you’ve decided on the questions you want to answer and the specialists that will use the dashboard, you should highlight critical metrics. Also, you should determine what information is needed to build reports and what sources should be connected to those reports.

Step 3. Make sure data collection works correctly. You must be sure of the quality of your data to make informed decisions. Make sure that information is collected accurately and without errors. Also, note that your attribution model should be tailored to your business needs.

Pat yourself on the shoulder if you meet these criteria:

• Information is provided clearly and intelligibly (graphs, tables, and charts precisely answer specific questions).

• Changes in metrics can be monitored at a specified frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, in real time).

• Information can be filtered by specified parameters.

As we mentioned above, each business has different requirements even within the same industry. If you want to meet any inquiry fully armed, you should think about your marketing analytics system in advance. You can begin to structure necessary reports by how often they’re needed (on demand, daily, monthly, or once a year) and which departments or specialists need them (some metrics are essential for PPC specialists, and entirely different metrics are crucial for the CMO).

Below are examples of various reports that may be useful to you.

When you need to assess performance and monitor daily goals at a glance, an overall report is what you need. For example, this dashboard from OWOX BI shows the performance of all marketing channels, traffic, and leads growth.

Overall reports are also actively used for monthly, annual, or any other summaries. For example, this one from OWOX BI shows the effectiveness of a website’s performance.

If you want to get such dashboards customized specifically for your company’s needs, book a demo with our specialists!

Note! Of course, not all templates are suitable for everyone. But you can adjust these dashboards and use the most successful ideas for yourself. Google Data Studio, one of the most popular data visualization services, has a great gallery of dashboard solutions (see the Data Studio Report Gallery). Let’s have a look at some examples.

Google Merchandise Store Ecommerce Report:

Website Performance Report:

SEO Report Template:

Organic Traffic Template:

Correct and timely reports are critical to your company’s success. Therefore, it’s important not only to choose the tool that best suits your business needs but to make sure that all interested colleagues have access to it and can work with it. After all, to remain relevant in a constantly changing market, you need to use all available information. Your data should work for you.

There are two common ways to improve reports:

1. Go from manual reporting to automated updates.
2. Convert static reporting to real-time automated updates.

As you can see, it all comes down to using modern cloud-based business intelligence tools that are flexible enough to evaluate and visualize complex data. OWOX BI is easy to use and helps you automate data collection and get ready-made marketing reports without the help of analysts.

Articles:

• How to build advanced marketing reports in Google Data Studio
• The OWOX BI guide for digital marketers: data collection, dashboards, and templates
• The most common reports for e-commerce and retail
• Marketing report templates and examples of daily, weekly, and monthly reports
• Top 6 Irreplaceable Digital Marketing Services to Boost Your Website Effectiveness

Video:

• Google Data Studio Tutorial for Beginners
• Google Data Studio Tutorial — How to build a Dashboard from MeasureSchool
• How to Create a Google Data Studio Dashboard from Social Media Examiner

With the development of martech tools, you no longer need to be a professional analyst to build reports and get answers to help reach your business objectives. All-in-one platforms such as OWOX BI help you manage your disparate data sources and evaluate your marketing effectiveness.

When you control your data, you can get useful insights and grow your business. If you want to start creating modern reports, test hypotheses faster, and keep your hand on the pulse of your business, sign up for a demo! Our specialists will show you how you can quickly achieve your business goals with the help of OWOX BI.